Society's ChildS


Bullseye

Channel General Awareness: UK attempts to identify those 'drawn into terrorism'

terrorist
The creeping use of counter-terrorism policies in Britain to clamp down on civil liberties appears to be relying on a number of flawed assumptions. Not content with the stigmatizing of Muslim communities, the U.K.'s spot the terrorist approach also has the potential to criminalise political activists and campaigners by labelling them with impossible-to-define terms such as non-violent extremist or domestic extremist.

Prevent is one strand of Britain's counter-terrorism strategy which has had various mutations since the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, 2005. The most recent and controversial addition to the widely discredited strategy has been the statutory duty placed on every local authority, educational institution, and NHS Trust — plus the police and Prison Service — to report those suspected of being "drawn into terrorism."

Attention

Dead San Bernardino suspects had infant baby, husband had gone to Saudi Arabia

San Bernardino
© Mike Blake / Reuters Police officers conduct a manhunt after a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California December 2, 2015.
The two suspects in the San Bernardino mass shooting that claimed 14 lives and wounded 17 people were a married couple. The man recently made a trip to Saudi Arabia, returning with his new wife, whom he met online.


Comment: The wife reportedly had a Pakistani passport.


As the police and FBI try to piece together events that led to Syed Farook, 28 and Tashfeen Malik, 27, murdering 14 people, shocked friends and colleagues have shared stories about Farook, a devout Muslim who never struck anyone as suspicious and was generally regarded as a kind man.

"Mr. Farook is a county employee. He works with his title as an environmental specialist in the Public Health Department. He has been employed there for five years," San Bernardino police chief Jarrod Burguan told reporters after the shootings.

"He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious," Griselda Reisinger, a colleague who worked with Farook until May, told the LA Times. Another, Patrick Baccari, said that upon Farook's return from Saudi Arabia, the couple and their six-month-old daughter were practically "living the American dream."

Baccari shared a cubicle with Farook. He and Christian Nwadike, another colleague, said the tall and thin Farook never acted in an irregular manner. A devout Muslim, he rarely discussed religion at work. He also almost never started conversations with others.

The entire office recently held a baby shower for Farook, before he had taken paternity leave.

Comment: What kind of 'argument' could drive a reportedly kind man, with a new 6-month-old baby, to do something so suicidal?


Arrow Up

Some California communities taking a fresh approach to helping the homeless

homeless man los angeles
© Reuters/Lucy NicholsonHomeless Los Angeles resident David Lowe in Beverly Hills, California in May 2012.
Many California communities take a law-enforcement approach to homelessness. But not Pacific Palisades.

On a sunny morning in the beachfront community of Pacific Palisades, Steven "Boston" Michaud perches confidently on a large dock tie just above the sand. He waves vaguely at the hills above the Pacific Coast Highway, indicating where he sleeps. "It's up there, but you'll never see me," he says, pointing to his own shadow on the ground, "because I'm a shadow and I don't bother anyone."

Mr. Michaud is one of about 170 homeless people in Pacific Palisades, an affluent waterfront neighborhood in Los Angeles. Pacific beaches have long been a magnet for the homeless from around the world.

Overall, California experienced the second-largest increase in the number of homeless people (1,786 individuals) among the 50 states this past year, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. As their ranks have swelled, some homeless people have edged out of the shadows and have taken up in tidier areas in the Golden State. That, in turn, has attracted the attention of residents - especially when crimes have occurred.

Comment: There is a distinct difference between cultures and city governments that are truly empathic and thus willing to work toward solving the problems that create homelessness and those who are psychopathic and seek to avoid responsibility by criminalizing homelessness to keep those less fortunate out of sight and mind. People need to understand that these problems can be solved if there is a concerted effort and a willingness to do so. The costs of not doing this are far more than just financial as a society that deliberately ignores its most vulnerable is issuing an invitation to widespread and inevitable social decline and degeneration.


Sheeple

Idiocracy is real: City reelects Mayor after he spent 7-years in jail for robbing them blind

idiocracy
© Still from Idiocracy"They didn’t believe they’d see it manifest into reality quite so soon"
At 43-years-old, Joseph P. Ganim had been the mayor of Connecticut's largest city for 12 years before stepping down to be arrested and convicted on multiple corruption charges.

On March 19, 2003, a federal court convicted Ganim of 16 counts of criminal misconduct, including racketeering, extortion, bribery, tax evasion and mail fraud.

Federal Judge, Janet Bond Arterton sentenced the former mayor to nine years in prison for "systematically using his office to enrich himself." Since his sentence was under ten years, Ganim, who undoubtedly would have been torn to shreds in a real prison, was able to serve out his 'punishment' in a federal camp, where conditions are far less restrictive than an actual prison.

After serving only seven of the nine years of his sentence, Ganim was signed out of the Watkinson Halfway House in Hartford for the final time on July 19, 2010.

For the next several years, this political criminal would strive to regain his law license and even have local attorneys recommend him to be readmitted to the bar. However, for the time being, his license was not reinstated and clearer heads prevailed.

Until now.

Heart

Russia aiming to become world's biggest exporter of non-GMO food

non gmo food russia
© Aleksandr Kondratuk / Sputnik
Russia could become the world's largest supplier of ecologically clean and high-quality organic food, said President Vladimir Putin on Thursday. He also called on the country to become completely self-sufficient in food production by 2020.

"We are not only able to feed ourselves taking into account our lands, water resources - Russia is able to become the largest world supplier of healthy, ecologically clean and high-quality food which the Western producers have long lost, especially given the fact that demand for such products in the world market is steadily growing," said Putin, addressing the Russian Parliament on Thursday.

According to the President, Russia is now an exporter, not an importer of food.

"Ten years ago, we imported almost half of the food from abroad, and were dependent on imports. Now Russia is among the exporters. Last year, Russian exports of agricultural products amounted to almost $20 billion - a quarter more than the revenue from the sale of arms, or one-third the revenue coming from gas exports," he said.

Putin said that all this makes Russia fully capable of supplying the domestic market with home-grown food by 2020.

In September, the Kremlin decided against producing food products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Russia imposed an embargo on the supply of products from the EU and the United States as a response to Western sanctions. After Turkey shot down Russian Su-24 bomber, Russian authorities decided to ban the import of fruit, vegetables and poultry from Turkey. The ban will take effect from January 1.

Comment: Russia once again putting the welfare of its citizens first and foremost.


Palette

Why the art world's raging narcissism epidemic is killing art

Jay Z
© Consequence of SoundJay Z and Marina Abramovic during the 2013 shoot for "Picasso Baby."
Narcissism is everywhere. News anchors say it prevents politicians from keeping their pants on. Teachers and coaches reinforce it by avoiding grades and giving out trophies that read "Participant." Adults and kids push it on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, while achievement-free celebrities turn it into worldwide exposure and profitable endorsements. Of course, it was only a matter of time until this blustery but debilitating epidemic struck an already self-absorbed art world.

And strike deep it has! Because artists in our time are defined simply as people who make art, they and those who covet their wares are especially susceptible to the narcissism bug. Take, for a start, American sociologist Howard Becker's modern-day definition of an artist: "If you do it [art], you must be an artist; conversely, if you are an artist, what you do must be art." That précis, of course, contains it's own vain syllogism; some would say it's downright self-aggrandizing. Consequently, just like Donald Trump—the one presidential candidate psychiatrists are willing to go out on limb to label clinically conceited—many artists today resemble textbook cases of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Comment: "When psychopaths rule above, everything below them goes through the process of ponerization, which basically means that humanity and beauty are stripped from the people's minds in a slow but steady pace, until it is replaced with a pathological sense of humanity and beauty - at best a caricature of the original, at worst its exact opposite - which is then reflected in our language, in our art and in our interpersonal relationships."


Stop

Nightmares in Palestine: Families deal with trauma following Israeli torture

Palestinian children
It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.

- Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. "Trauma and Recovery"
To understand psychiatric home visits in Palestine necessitates forgoing Western assumptions about patient confidentiality, privacy, and timeliness. Though individual patients often refer themselves to treatment centers after a release from prison, the difficulty of traveling to and from major cities requires therapists to make home visits. Families then participate in the session as a group, thereby coming to better understand their family member's situation and relieving some of their own symptoms as well. Throughout Palestine, families are regularly made to feel that their own house is unsafe and outside of their control. Violence may overtake a peaceful setting without warning, and to resist an arrest would be to invite danger on the rest of the relatives. A study conducted by the Ramallah Treatment and Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture (TRC) examining arrests as trauma-inducing events explains that, "92% of arrests [surveyed] happened at home, and most of [them] happened...in the time periods of deep sleep after midnight. This had caused severe emotional and psychological damages to the families, and doubled the impact of emotional suffering and immediate trauma" ("The Impact of Detention on Palestinian Detainees' Families in Israeli Prisons," 2011).

Vader

Renegade Alabama cops accused of falsely arresting 100s of black youths

Squad cars
© Robert Kuykendall
An organization called The Alabama Justice Project obtained the documents and information from a group of police officers who are choosing to remain anonymous due to threats they have previously received from colleagues.

The documents, originally published on a website called The Henry Report, state that for years up to a dozen police officers on a narcotics team were found to have planted drugs and weapons on black male suspects. They also allege that the framing of suspects was conducted under the supervision of Steve Parrish, now the current Dothan Police Chief, and former Sergeant Andy Hughes, now the Director of Homeland Security for the State of Alabama.

Comment: The overall evidence is damning - you can read the extensive in-depth details, and view some of the documented evidence, at The Henry Report:

Leaked documents reveal Dothan Police Department planted drugs on young black men for years, district attorney Doug Valeska complicit


Heart - Black

Unfettered, free-market capitalism - the harm to human dignity

capitalism oligarchs profit
© Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock.com
On the free market it is legal and customary to violate the dignity of our fellow human beings

When I ask students attending my lectures at the Vienna University of Economics and Business what they understand human dignity to be, I frequently encounter a general, awkward silence. The students do not appear to have heard or learned anything about it in the course of their studies. This is all the more alarming considering the fact that dignity is the highest value: it is the first-named value in countless constitutions and it forms the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dignity signifies value: the same, unconditional, unalienable value of all human beings. Dignity requires no "achievement" other than existence. It is from the equal value of all human beings that our equality derives - in the sense that all human beings living in a democracy should have the same liberties, rights and opportunities. And only if everyone really does have the same liberties is the condition fulfilled for enabling everyone to be really free.

Immanuel Kant wrote that human dignity can only be preserved in daily life and interactions if we deem and treat each other as being of equal value: "So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means." [emphasis Kant's]

By contrast, on the free market it is legal and customary to instrumentalize our fellow human beings, violating their dignity because our goal is not to protect it. Our goal is to gain personal advantage, and in many cases this can be achieved more easily if we take advantage of others and violate their dignity. What is decisive is my attitude and my priority: am I interested in the greatest good and the preservation of the dignity of all, which is something which affects me automatically and which I benefit from as well, or am I primarily interested in my own welfare and my own advantage, which others might, but will not necessarily draw benefit from? If we pursue our own advantage as our supreme goal, the customary practice is to use others as means to achieve this goal and to take advantage of them accordingly. For this reason, Smith's perversion of goal and by-product leads to widespread violations of human dignity and the systematic restriction of the liberty of many.

Stock Down

Can rising healthcare costs lead to the next Great Recession?

US healthcare cartel
© tnd.com
Why the coming Great Recession is brought to you by the Healthcare Cartel is painfully simple: in an era of stagnant household incomes, every additional dollar devoted to rising healthcare insurance, outrageously unaffordable medications and soaring co-pays is one less dollar that's available to be saved, invested or spent on something other than healthcare.

Recent headlines tell the story: off-patent medications suddenly leap in price, healthcare premiums jump 25+% in a single year, co-pays increase and the deductibles on many insurance plans are so high that the coverage is more phantom than real: if you have to spend $5,000 before your insurance plan pays $1, what value is the coverage?

If the plan costs $5,000 a year, but doesn't pay a dime of expenses until you've spent $5,000, then the plan actually costs $10,000.